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April 4, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:59
April 4, 2012, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
My head's spinning.
I'm trying to keep track here.
Obama goes out, says what he says about the court never overturning laws passed by Congress, and everybody is blown away by how stupid he is.
He's not stupid.
He knows about judicial review.
He's heard of Marbury versus Madison.
It's not what he's doing here.
What he's doing is even more cynical than you can imagine.
Hi, folks.
How are you?
Rush Limbaugh here.
Already Wednesday, fastest week in media.
Here we are at Hump Day.
It's great to have you here, as always.
Our telephone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, and the email address, lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
Before we get to that, Obama's speech yesterday on the economy and Paul Ryan, this also plundered new depths of cynicism and outright prevarication.
But it's an election year, and Obama does not have one thing in his record to run on.
He cannot point, nor can the Democrats, to one thing they have done and say, you want more of this?
Vote for us.
Not one, folks.
There isn't a single thing.
Now, they're going to try to make Obama care that, but the court might get in the way.
But I want you to listen to Obama yesterday afternoon talking to his stenographers at the AP and the American Society of News Editors, the ASNI Convention.
The acronym is ASNE.
This was specifically during the Associated Press luncheon.
I want you to listen to one soundbite.
We'll get into this in greater detail as the program unfolds.
I want to do the judge stuff first, but I just want you to hear this because this is an example of what we're going to be hearing from now through the election.
Two million mothers and young children would be cut from a program that gives them access to healthy food.
There would be 4,500 fewer federal grants at the Department of Justice and the FBI to combat violent crime, financial crime, and help secure our borders.
Hundreds of national parks would be forced to close for part or all of the year.
We wouldn't have the capacity to enforce the laws that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the food that we eat.
Our weather forecasts would become less accurate because we wouldn't be able to afford to launch new satellites.
Now, this is the worst of the worst that we've had from President Obama.
It is shameful.
It is sophomoric.
It's sophistry.
It is a blatant appeal to the dumbest Americans.
It really is pathetic.
It is beneath the office of the presidency.
But it is an appeal to the stupidest of our people.
Let me talk about Ryan's budget.
It's what he's talking about, is Paul Ryan's budget.
Paul Ryan's budget doesn't balance for what, till 2040?
Paul Ryan's budget is less than a trillion dollars smaller than Obama's.
Paul Ryan's budget doesn't cut anything.
Takes a long time to balance.
It shifts some things, but it's not draconian at all.
None of this, let's go through this line by line.
Two million mothers and young children will be cut from a program that gives them access to healthy food.
Okay, so the Republicans are going to purposely starve 2 million mothers and their children.
Or, said another way, Republicans want 2 million mothers and their children to have contaminated food.
There would be 4,500 fewer federal grants at the Department of Justice and the FBI to combat violent crime, financial crime, and help secure the borders.
So the Republicans want rape to increase, bank robbery to increase.
The Republicans want more illegal immigrants flooding across the border.
The Republicans want Wall Street banks to continue to screw people.
The Republicans want more violent crime.
The Republicans don't want to secure the border.
Hundreds of national parks would be forced to close for part or all of the year because the Republicans don't like nature.
The Republicans don't want you to go to Yosemite.
The Republicans don't want you to go to the Grand Canyon.
Republicans don't want you anywhere when, in fact, it's the Democrats who are trying to limit your access to those places under the global warming BS.
But this problem with this is, we'll have Ryan's response to this later in the program.
How do you respond to this?
It is to take it seriously, as I'm doing here, is to fall into the trap.
Well, I know you have to take it seriously, but to rebut it line by line seriously like I'm doing, I mean, this is really a challenge because we all exist on a high plane.
He is down here.
He's just above the gutter with this.
And frankly, I don't know how to get in the gutter and I don't want to be there.
But he is appealing to the absolute most ignorant segment of our population with this and with what he's doing with the Supreme Court and the decision upcoming on his health care bill.
It is clear what he's doing.
And it's clear what he thinks of this country.
His reelection hinges on him being able to mobilize the ignorant, the shallow, the uninformed, the uneducated, the dumb, and the stupid.
That is who he's appealing to.
Now, how many of you think that there are a lot of those people in this country?
Are there enough of them to win somebody the White House?
This is a stark contrast from this big messianic campaign from 2008.
This is a striking difference.
Here, listen, he said here, we wouldn't have the capacity to enforce the laws that protect the air that we breathe, the water we drink, or the food we said.
The Republicans want to poison the air when they want to poison the water.
Republicans want dirty air, want dirty water.
This is what he's saying.
And he thinks that there are or is a huge number of Americans that will believe this.
He also knows that every journalist in that audience yesterday is going to pass this on as though it's all true.
That the Republicans do want dirty water and do want dirty air, and they want contaminated food for American mothers.
The media in that room is going to spread that message for Obama.
Is there a different air supply for Republicans?
Is there a different water supply for Republicans?
If there is, I want to know.
I want to know where these Republicans who want contaminated food are buying their food.
I want to know where Republicans who are contaminating the water are getting theirs so that I can survive.
And I want to know who these Republicans are.
I want names.
I want names of Republicans who are contaminating the food, poisoning the water, encouraging crime, rapes, murders, incest, all of that.
I want to know who these Republicans are so I can make friends with them and stay on their good side so that my water and air are not tainted.
Am I going to have to construct a bubble at my house and have a secret pipe for that clean air run to my house?
Where is it?
Where am I going to get that air?
And ditto, where am I going to get the water?
And what am I going to have to do with a local police force to make sure that the crime they're going to allow to happen now will not happen at my house?
Weather forecasts would become less accurate because we wouldn't be able to afford to launch.
Who is it that essentially shut down NASA?
He did.
Who is it that made it necessary for satellite launches to occur now in Russia?
Well, NASA's still going to do some satellite launches.
The shuttle program's been shut down.
So this was a, I guess, a precursor or a foretelling of what the Obama campaign is going to be.
And this is standard operating procedure.
This is what happened in 1995 during the budget bill.
This is what Democrats always say to one degree or another about Republican budgets.
What you need to know is Obama submitted a budget back in February.
It went down to defeat 414 to nothing.
The Democrats control the Senate.
They could pass a budget today.
Republicans couldn't stop them because you don't need 51 votes to pass a budget.
You don't need 60.
And the Democrats have 53, what is it, 54 seats.
They can pass whatever they want.
They haven't advanced a budget in three years.
The Democrats haven't because they don't want anything on paper for which they will be held accountable.
They don't want anything on paper that can be run against for three years.
The Democrats in Congress have not presented a budget.
Obama's last two budgets have gone down to humiliating defeats.
Paul Ryan has a budget here that attempts to do some good things, and you can see it's under assault, under attack, with one lie and one mischaracterization after another.
Okay, so that's that.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back, and we will swerve into Obama and whether or not he understands judicial review.
Badoo, badoo, badoo, badoo.
And everybody agreed with me, right?
On the Fox segments.
Well, it's only got to have one guy done a grade.
It's fair and balanced.
But for the most part, I mean, the smart people agree.
Okay.
Hi, folks.
How are you, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network?
Barack Obama, a couple of days ago, gets a question at a joint press conference with Stephen Harper and Felipe Coleron about the Supreme Court decision coming up on Obamacare.
And what he says makes it sound like he doesn't understand the concept of judicial review, which was established in a long ago Supreme Court case called Marbury versus Madison, which the court appointed to itself the job, the right of determining what and what isn't constitutional in terms of what comes out of Congress.
And it's been that way for hundreds of years.
Obama implicitly implied that he doesn't know that.
And there have been a number of commentators reacting to Obama as though they really think he doesn't know what judicial review is.
And I'm shocked that anybody thinks that Obama doesn't know what judicial review is.
Yeah, he went to Harvard.
Yeah, he's been educated and ill-informed by a whole bunch of leftists, but he knows what judicial review is.
He knows the Supreme Court determines what's constitutional and not.
And yet commentator after commentator after commentator explores that possibility when that's not at all what's going on here.
Some of them are quite good, by the way.
Here's one: Tom Lambert, who is a professor of law at the University of Missouri, Columbia, the main campus.
Imagine if you picked up your morning paper to read.
No, no, I'm going to tell you what's going on here.
I know exactly what Obama's doing.
He is setting Republicans up for a giant kill politically.
When I finish explaining this, it's not going to take very long.
You're going to have a total comprehension of what's going on here.
And you're also probably going to end up concluding that there was a leak on that preliminary vote and that it did go against him.
But we'll get there here in due course and in a semblance of order.
Tom Lambert, University of Missouri, Columbia, writing at a blog called Truth on the Market, academic commentary on law, business, economics, and more.
Imagine if you picked up your morning paper to read that one of your astronomy professors had publicly questioned whether the Earth, in fact, revolves around the sun, or suppose that one of your economics professors was quoted as saying that consumers would purchase more gasoline if the price would simply rise.
Or maybe your hasskruel math teacher was publicly insisting that 2 plus 2 equals 5, you'd be a little embarrassed, right?
You'd worry that your colleagues and friends might begin to question your astronomical, economic, and mathematical literacy.
Now, now you know how I felt this morning when I read in the Wall Street Journal that my own constitutional law professor, this guy was taught constitutional law by Obama.
Now you know how I felt this morning when I read in the Wall Street Journal that my own constitutional law professor had stated that it would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step for the court to overturn a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.
And he goes on to express his incredulity over this.
Now, Obama did teach constitutional law, but I've looked into this.
What he taught basically was the 14th Amendment, agitation, community organizer kind of stuff, social justice stuff, using the Constitution for that.
He didn't get into.
It had one specific era.
The 14th Amendment is what he focused on as a law professor.
Okay, that's Tom Lambert.
James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, best of the web today.
The man who knew too little.
We were half joking yesterday.
We asked if Obama slept through his Harvard law class on Marbury versus Madison, the 1803 case, in which the court first asserted its power to strike down unconstitutional laws.
Turns out, it's no joke, the president is stunningly ignorant about constitutional law.
The most interesting part of his answer was the beginning, in which he tried to walk back or at least clarify his statement from yesterday.
Spoke slowly, long pauses, giving the sense he was speaking with great thought and precision.
Well, first of all, to be very specific, pause, we have not goes on.
And then Obama cited a case before the newspaper editors yesterday.
He said, a law like that's not been overturned, pause, at least since Lochner, right?
So we're going back to the 30s, pre-New Deal.
And everybody's supposed to fawn.
Oh, well, he knows cases.
President knows Kate Lochner?
Wow.
What a smart guy.
Wow.
Well, as Mr. Taranto points out, Lochner was a case from 1905, 30 years before the New Deal.
And the full name of the case is Lochner versus New York, meaning it wasn't a federal case.
Obama cited a federal state case, Lochner v. New York, in order to indicate that he knew what he was talking about when it comes to judicial review of Obamacare.
The full name of the case, Lochner v. New York, should be sufficient tip-off in Lochner.
The court invalidated a state labor regulation on the ground that it violated the liberty of contract, which the court held was an aspect of liberty protected by the 14th Amendment's due process clause.
That's why he cited it, because he teaches the 14th Amendment, which is basically Obama taught race and grievance law.
Race, gender, grievance law.
That's what he taught.
That's why he remembers Lochner.
But Lochner is not a federal case.
Lochner does not involve Obamacare and the Commerce Clause as he attempts to use it in Obamacare because it hasn't happened before.
Well, see, Mr. Lumbaugh, then maybe your argument is really wrong.
This is Mr. Newcastradi.
Maybe Mr. Lumbaugh, Obama really is trying as hard as D.K. but doesn't understand the whole concept of Marbury.
No, no, no.
No, no, no, no.
You Obama people really want to try to tell the rest of us he's this stupid?
Is that what we want to?
We want to go from the smartest, most sophisticated, most erudite, messianic political figure in our history in 2008 to he's stupid.
Is that really what you want us to believe?
I simply refuse to accept the notion that Obama doesn't know what he's talking about.
I refuse to accept the notion that he doesn't understand judicial review, doesn't know what Marbury versus Madison is.
I think he's doing something entirely different.
He is appealing to the dumbest, the most uninformed, and what he's basically telling them is, this court is going to take away your health care that I've given you.
That's what he said.
And he's counting on the dumb and the stupid to believe that, to not read any of these law professors who are correct.
He doesn't care.
Details coming up.
Romney is speaking at ASNI, the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
He had a great line.
He said, the president came here yesterday and railed against arguments nobody is making and criticized policies nobody is proposing.
And that is exactly right.
And the question needs to be asked, what is going to happen to mothers and women and children and the poor and the water and the air and the national parks when Obama's Ponzi scheme crashes?
If we don't do anything, Obama's going to finish off this country on his own.
If we just sit back and don't do anything, it doesn't take the Republicans to poison the water or anything else.
We're going to be so flat broke.
We already got signs of Greece happening at the University of California Santa Barbara, I believe.
Cops had to use pepper spray.
30 students were protesting tuition increases or something.
We've seen it in Europe.
We're going to see more of it here.
Now, as to Obama, judicial review, Marbury versus Madison, all of this.
Let's be perfectly clear.
He knows what he's doing.
He knows he was lying.
He knows about judicial review.
He knows that the Supreme Court has thrown out many cases, many laws, and overturned many laws.
He knows all this.
People that have never gone to law school know this, but every he knows it.
It's absurd, folks, to think that he doesn't know this.
His audience, for those comments that he's made the last two days on Obamacare in the Supreme Court, is the ignorant population of America who he wants to believe that the court is going to do something it's never done before.
He wants.
And by the way, I'm not trying to be insulting.
I'm actually trying to be as descriptive as I can.
I mean, I could say the MTV generation, but I could say the people that watch E-Entertainment tonight all day and want to be on it.
But that's not, really, you know the status of our education in this country.
You know how ill-educated and maleducated people are and have been for decades because of the public school system.
His audience is, and it's sad that he and the Democrat Party think that a presidency can be one appealing to this group, but that's what he's doing.
The ignorant population of America who he wants to believe that the court is going to do something it's never done before, and that's take away their health insurance that he gave them.
That's all he wants.
He doesn't care what the law professors at the University of Missouri write.
He doesn't care what James Taranto writes.
He doesn't care because he knows his audience isn't going to see what they write.
His audience is never going to hear one disagreement with what Obama has said.
His audience will listen to him because the media will see to it that he is where they watch.
That this court's going to do something they've never done before.
The court is going to take away their health care that he gave them.
The court is going to take away their insurance and he's going to take away their treatment.
The court is.
That's all this is.
A brazen pander to the stupid, the uninformed.
And he's counting on the stupid to never come in contact with shows like this, or columns by James Taranto, or blogs written by professors at the University of Missouri Law School.
He's counting on them running into things like this.
Maureen Dowd has a column in the New York Times called Men in Black.
I think she owes her royalty to Mark Levin.
He has a book by that title long before Maureen Dowd wrote her piece.
But that's another subject.
Maureen Dowd in the New York Times actually wonders in her column why Obama should have to respect the court.
That's her point.
Why does he have to even listen to him?
And I'll give you a little hint, he won't, folks.
If it is a decision he doesn't like, he'll just not accept.
Mark my words.
Maureen Dowd apparently doesn't know that the court is a co-equal branch of government.
She goes on to rant this.
This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one, once they give the last word, is well on its way to becoming one of the most divisive in modern American history.
It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is unbiased, honest, and guardian of the Constitution.
Well, that's exactly what Obama wanted.
That's what he wants.
That's the kind of response he wants from his two days of remarks on the court.
Now, keep in mind, the court hasn't even reached a decision yet.
We don't know what it is.
And yet, Obama's trashing it.
And now Maureen comes along and trashes it.
And it's all aimed at the stupid.
Now, you might be, well, Rush, the stupid aren't going to read the New York Times either.
No, but the New York Times is the Bible for all the other news media.
This will dribble down to an Associated Press story in the Oshkosh Gazette.
No offense, Oshkosh.
Wherever.
The Entertainment Tonight shows might even decide to do a feature on this.
You never know.
Healthcare.
Supreme Court, what would you do if they take away your health care?
That's all it would take.
And that's what Obama wants.
Maureen Dowd's not alone, though.
There is another article which spells out exactly the response Obama was hoping for at Tina Brown's juggernaut website, The Daily Beast.
And the headline at the Daily Beast reads, impeach the Supreme Court justices if they overturn health care law.
The author is somebody named David Dow, and he has determined that Obamacare is clearly constitutional.
And naturally, being a Democrat in good standing, he has decided that if any of the justices disagree with him, they are not only mistaken, but they're guilty of an impeachable offense.
So off with their robes.
We don't know what Mr. Dow's legal background is.
He doesn't give us.
But it sounds like he must have gone to Harvard Law School to me.
Now, you and I, we sit here and laugh, but this is exactly what Obama wants the dumb segment of our population to think about the Supreme Court.
This is what he was getting.
This is what he was aiming for.
He doesn't care that James Taranto thinks he doesn't know the Constitution.
He doesn't care that a law professor at the University of Columbia, Missouri at Columbia doesn't know Marbury versus Madison.
What he wants out there is that the Supreme Court is going to take away people's health care, that they face financial ruin as a result.
And this court needs to be impeached.
And we have, therefore, a boiling pot of division.
Once again, the heat turned on and turned up by our own president, who we were told was going to unite everybody.
We were going to have a post-racial country, post-partisan country.
We were going to have love and respect.
We're going to have a utopia.
Everybody was going to love each other, and everybody was going to love us.
And we are as divided a country as we've ever been, and the author of the division is the president himself.
He's counting on most people being too uneducated to realize that everything he said in his press conference about the courts, a flat-out lie.
He knows it's a lie, and he knows he's lying.
And he knows he can get away with it because there's not one reporter in the audience at the news editor's luncheon that is going to challenge him on what he said.
They're going to amplify it.
They're the echo chamber.
They're going to make sure his words get out there exactly as he spoke them.
He knows that he can count on the Maureen Dowds of the world at the New York Times and the Daily Beast and the rest of our one-party media to beat this drum.
So that even if the Supreme Court does the right thing and strikes down Obamacare, he will be able to claim it was only because they're a bunch of partisan hacks.
They are tools of the Republicans.
It's just like Bush versus Gore, and it's just like Citizens United.
And the dumb and stupid don't know what those are either, except that they represent a Republican court.
That's all.
And as such, this court is nothing but a bunch of partisan hacks who do not like our brave, young president and are out to sabotage his presidency.
That will be what he wants.
That's the objective.
Let's take a brief time out.
Audio soundbites on this subject coming up after this.
So sit tight, don't go away.
Now, yesterday afternoon, a judge, a federal judge by the name of Jerry Smith at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Houston, had enough.
And he demanded that the Justice Department give him a three-page memo on whether or not this administration understands the concept of judicial review.
Now, I saw this.
I started cheering.
I started laughing because it's about time people started fighting back on this.
The American people love the concept of a team.
You have the right people on the team.
But we are a team here.
There is a team that's opposing this president and attempting to make him a one-termer this November at the ballot box.
And it's great to have this response.
In fact, do you know, ladies, today, I was told yesterday afternoon that today, in the First Circuit, the Obama Justice Department is arguing that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and therefore the Supreme Court, or that court, rather, the First Court, First Circuit, should have the courage to tune out politics and strike it down.
Now, this administration said not long ago they're going to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act.
Now, the day after Obama goes out and says it's unprecedented, the Supreme Court's never overturned a law.
His own Department of Justice is asking the First Circuit to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act.
Just another bit of evidence that he knows what he's doing.
He knows he was lying through his teeth yesterday.
He knows full well that courts strike down laws all the time.
Laws passed by Congress by whatever vote and majority.
Here's Jerry Smith.
The microphones were in the courtroom in Houston yesterday, the Fifth Circuit.
This was during oral arguments in a separate challenge to another aspect of the federal health care law.
Jerry Smith, the judge, and an Obama Department of Justice lawyer, Dana Lydia Kearsvangl, or Kearsvang, I'm sorry, Kearsvang, about Obama's remarks to the court that they shouldn't overturn the health care reform law.
Here's the judge.
Does the Department of Justice recognize that federal courts have the authority in appropriate circumstances to strike federal statutes because of one or more constitutional infirmities?
Yes, Your Honor.
Of course, there would need to be a separability analysis, but I'm referring to statements by the President in the past few days to the effect, and I'm sure you've heard about them, that it is somehow inappropriate for what he termed unelected judges to strike acts of Congress that have enjoyed, and he was referring, of course, to Obamacare, to what he termed broad consensus and majorities in both houses of Congress.
That has troubled a number of people who have read it as somehow a challenge to the federal courts or to their authority or to the appropriateness of the concept of judicial review.
And that's not a small matter.
It really isn't in the legal sphere.
It isn't a small matter.
He's calling these guys out.
He was threatening.
He was intimidating.
He was warning these guys.
And this guy not going to sit back and take, oh, yeah, yeah, give me some clarification on this.
And of course, the Department of Justice lawyer, well, of course we know about you.
Of course, courts can strike down law.
Well, then you better tell your president.
Because, no, no, here's the point.
While Obama is purely politicizing, while he's got an audience there of what he thinks is enough dumb, uneducated people to believe that the court simply wants to take away health care from them, at the same time, what he's doing is having a major, profound effect on the court system in general.
He's challenging their independence.
He's challenging their existence.
And I'm going to tell you, this judge speaking up, in my view, this judge is very brave.
The one is going to look at this as insolence.
Obama is going to look at it.
How dare he.
How dare he challenge me publicly like this?
How dare he embarrass me?
How dare this judge lift his hand up to me?
That's going to be the reaction.
This judge has now made himself a target of the regime.
We may never know how the regime decides to take action against this judge.
Judge Smith then continued.
I would like to have from you by noon on Thursday, that's about 48 hours from now, a letter stating what is the position of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice in regard to the recent statements by the President, stating specifically and in detail in reference to those statements what the authority is of the federal courts in this regard in terms of judicial review.
That letter needs to be at least three pages single space, no less, and it needs to be specific.
Judge Smith, by the way, I love the fact he called it Obamacare from the bench.
And he tells this lawyer, you go back to your boss.
I want three pages on this.
It's like a college professor punishing a student who doesn't quite understand what's going.
You go back and you get me three pages, no less single-spaced.
I can't, single-spaced.
He gets that specific.
And it needs to be specific because he wants these people.
Obama's out saying there is no such thing.
It's never happened.
Judge Smith wants Obama's Justice Department to have it on paper from their office that essentially the president either doesn't know what he's talking about or is lying.
That's what's going on here.
These judges, folks, they serve for life.
Their egos aren't chump change either.
They have just the same kind of self-importance Obama does, and they're going to sit around here and be belittled like this.
It isn't going to happen.
All right, folks, that's it.
Another exciting excursion into broadcast excellence.
Busy broadcast hour is finished and it's on its way over to the Limbaugh Broadcast Museum.
The virtual version is up.
Has been for once.
Great if you haven't seen it.
See it at rushlimbaugh.com.
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